What I think is lovely about Naruto and Hinata’s relationship is the same thing I find lovely about Naruto and Shikamaru’s friendship - there was no ‘overcoming’ of anything regarding Naruto’s intrinsic nature that led them to loving him. A very important part of the development between Naruto and Iruka, for example, is the fact that Iruka had to force himself to see past his prejudices to the sad, scared, lonely little boy that eight-year-old Naruto was; it took years of working side by side for Sakura to view him as anything more than the annoying loudmouth that cut into her fawning and preening time. Not that I’m holding it against those two for working through their own issues and understanding that their initial, one-dimensional assessments of him were wrong, especially considering in Iruka’s case he was most definitely fed propaganda regarding Naruto his entire youth, but… everyone initially had some sort of issue with him that they had to get over, and can you imagine how fucking degrading that is? Think of the way the villagers celebrated him after he defeated Pein and saved all their asses. “Hi, there’s an immutable part of your identity that I find irredeemably foul and abrasive, but I have nevertheless decided to grace you with the benevolence of my tolerance and company.” Man I’d fucking go apeshit that’s so backhanded lmao
On the other hand, Hinata and Shikamaru didn’t have to do any of that, because they never saw anything inherently wrong with Naruto’s character to begin with. Sure, he was brash and loud and ill-mannered and hot-headed and maybe a little daft and a whole host of other unpalatable things, but they didn’t see those things as a weakness - they were just Naruto. They were two of the few characters (alongside Choji and Kiba, I suppose, considering they were Naruto’s other close friends during school, but I think that’s just because they were genuinely nice rather than because there was something about Naruto specifically that attracted them) with the ability not to look past all of Naruto’s 'bad’ qualities, but to not acknowledge that he has any bad qualities in the first place. Could they be wrong? Of course, everyone has some drawbacks, but they were also, like, six. We can forgive them their optimism.
I think the reason for this is because, even at such a young age, both Hinata and Shikamaru were already emotionally mature enough to be cognisant of their own drawbacks. Shikamaru is comfortable in acknowledging that he’s lazy, maybe a bit of a smartass, definitely picked up some heavy cynicism from his father… but those things don’t make him any less of a good shinobi, any less worthy of having friends and family and fun. It’s just him. We all collectively agree that Hinata obviously had some serious self-esteem issues courtesy of her father, was very self-critical and anxious about her skills - but the way this manifested in her emotionally is that it made her want to work harder, gave her more drive, in order to prove herself to her father and show that she was worthy of being his heir. This points to the fact that Hinata’s self-esteem issues didn’t lead to self-loathing, they led to a thirst for improvement, and everyone knows that the first step towards improvement is always to acknowledge your faults. Moreover, the qualities she saw in Naruto that made him ‘bad’ are the qualities she wanted to see in herself - confident, unafraid, stubborn, not deferential, always asking questions. If she, Hinata, strove so hard to have even a smidgen of the personality Naruto had, how could those traits possibly be bad?
This level of emotional intelligence set them apart from the rest of their agemates, and let them understand that a person is no less a person for being human. Therefore, when they both stumbled into the connections they built with Naruto, they didn’t have the preconceived notions that everyone else did - they were completely judgement free, because judging other people would open themselves up to judgement, too, and nobody likes being judged. Furthermore, I think Hinata and Shikamaru had mastered the ability of looking at people as a sum of all their parts; after all, if we were to judge someone like Hinata on a weighted scale of her individual traits, her level of social anxiety would outweigh all her other traits combined, but altogether they come together to make a rather sweet, intelligent, and powerful individual.
IDK if any of this made any semblance of sense but that’s why I personally really value NaruHina. It was one of the few times when someone appreciated Naruto not despite his negative qualities, but for them.
